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29 September 2008,
the day the Internet was validated as more influential than the
traditional press:

People discovered that to “Change Congress,” you simply need a ballot
box – or the threat of one.

All this was reflected on political sites, forums and blogs – but not a
hint of this sentiment was expressed by the professional media. So when
Congress rejected the Bill on that Monday, America’s punditocracy expressed
its shock. It also reported that the markets were “astonished” – the
markets being presumed to have a better grasp of what American citizens
want than American citizens themselves.

All week, the media had refrained from comment that might embarrass the
political class. In fact, the first professional column I read which was
reflected the true feelings of many US citizens around me was written
from 3,500 miles away and published in London’s Sunday Times.

Avril Lavigne fans push their girl's video to #1 on YouTube by
pretending to cheat:

On June 19th, the Avril Lavigne fansite Avril Bandaids launched a
“Girlfriend” YouTube Viewer (It’s now been retired) with the
intention of making “Girlfriend” the #1 YouTube video of all time. The
url that hosted the viewer reloaded the video every 15 seconds. The theory
was that Avril fans could load up that url, let it run, and Avril would
get the top video spot in no time.

Well, Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, Wired.com, The Globe and
Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, and many others picked up the story
and started crying “foul.” How dare this hardcore group choose the
number one YouTube video for us!? How dare they! And that’s where this
story gets good.

There was no foul. YouTube caps it’s views per specific IP at 200 per
day. (That may sound like a lot, but it’s not enough for a small legion
of hardcore fans to make a dent in a number approacing 100,000,000.) There
was no way they could game YouTube in the way they were purporting;
and they knew it all along.

So they leveraged their leverage by provoking media outrage,
causing millions of people to watch the video to see what it's about,
and now causing a third wave of blog posts, thus producing
still more views.

Now that's clever.

Not the sort of thing you'll ever see come out of telcos or cablecos, either.

Andrew Odlyzko asks what if the duopoly gets its way and completely
does away with net neutrality:

But what if they do get their wish, net neutrality is consigned to the
dustbin, and they do build their new services, but nobody uses them? If
the networks that are built are the ones that are publicly discussed,
that is a likely prospect. What service providers publicly promise to
do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build
special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects
to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to offer all that much
revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode
is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary. If service providers
are to derive significant revenues and profits by exploiting freedom
from net neutrality limitations, they will need to engage in much more
intrusive control of traffic than just provision of special channels
for streaming movies.

But video, and more generally content (defined as material prepared by
professionals for wide distribution, such as movies, music, newscasts,
and so on), is not king, and has never been king. While content has
frequently dominated in terms of volume of traffic, connectivity has
almost universally been valued much more highly and brought much higher
revenues. Movies cannot be counted on to bring in anywhere near as much
in revenues as voice services do today.

The Internet isn't about Sarnoff's Law (broadcast content like TV, radio, and newspapers)
or even about Metcalfe's Law (1-n connectivity, like telephone or VoIP):
it's about Reed's law,
2n-n connectivity, such as blogs, P2P, and facebook).
That's my interpretation;
Odlyzko probably wouldn't agree.

Anyway, that video content such as movies is king is one of the primary
delusions Odlyzko addresses in this paper.
The other is that movies need to be streamed in realtime.
It is mysterious why people continue to believe that in the face of the massive
evidence BitTorrent and other P2P services that deliver big content
in chunks faster than realtime.
I can only attribute this second delusion
to a bellhead mindset that still thinks in
terms of telephone, which was realtime because nobody knew any other
way to do it back in the analog-copper-wire-connection day.

As Odlyzko sums it up:

The general conclusion is that the story presented by service providers,
that they need to block net neutrality in order to be able to afford
to construct special features in their networks for streaming movies,
is simply not credible. If lack of net neutrality requirements is to be
exploited, it will have to be done through other, much more intrusive
means.

So why let the duopoly force a policy on everyone else that won't even work
to the advantage of the duopoly?

One way to get net neutrality would be to let the duopoly have its way,
and wait for it to implode.
However, given that for streaming video to have any chance of succeeding,
the duopoly would have to clamp down on everything else to eliminate
any competition, I shudder to think what this would mean.
The Internet as a source of real news and opinion would go away.
Given that the vestigial traditional news media in the U.S.
(TV, radio, newspapers) provide so little news, there's a very
good chance that most people in the U.S. wouldn't even know
how bad they had it as the country sped its slide into parochialism
and irrelevance.
How many people even know now that the U.S. has slid from #1 to #23
or whatever the latest number is in broadband uptake?
If the duopoly is given its head, even fewer would know.

If we let King Kong Telco and T Rex Cableco battle it out to be
Movie King of the Internet, where does that leave poor Fay Wray Public?

FCC, FTC, Congress, executive, and courts, not to mention the public,
should all read Odlyzko's
paper, and should all refuse the duopoly's demand for special
privileges that won't even produce profits for the duopoly.
Then all of above should legislate, enforce, and maintain
net neutrality so we will all profit and benefit.
Yes, even the duopoly can win with this.

Greenwald notes that AT&T spends more in three months for
lobbying than EFF’s entire budget for a year.
Then he spells out how the lobbying revolving door works, and concludes:

The “two sides” referenced there means the House Democratic leadership
and the telecoms. Congressional leaders are “negotiating” with the
telecoms — the defendants in pending lawsuits — regarding the best way
for immunizing them from liability for their lawbreaking, no doubt with
the help of the former Democratic members and staffers now being paid by
the telecoms to speak to their former bosses and colleagues about what
they should do. To describe the process is to illustrate its oozing,
banana-republic-like corruption, but that’s generally how our laws
are written.

None of this is particularly new, but it’s still remarkable to be able
to document it in such grotesque detail and see how transparent it all
is. In one sense, it’s just extraordinary how seamlessly and relentlessly
the wheels of this dirty process churn. But in another sense, it’s perhaps
even more remarkable — given the forces lined up behind telecom amnesty
— that those who have been working against it, with far fewer resources
and relying largely on a series of disruptive tactics and ongoing efforts
to mobilize citizen anger, have been able to stop it so far.

Remember, AT&T and the other telcos and cablecos are the same
companies that want to nuke net neutrality in the name of competition
and progress; two other flags they behind, just like the banana republic
flag of national security.

Permitting long distance service to be given away is not in the public interest.

In other words, if the telcos couldn’t make money off of it, nobody should.

A usually reliable source says:

The ACTA petition was the first time that the FCC confronted VoIP as a
policy issue. The FCC, however, never acted on the ACTA petition, and
ACTA, the moving party, no longer exists. The question presented by the
ACTA petition was whether the FCC had regulatory authority to regulate
VoIP Internet software used by individuals to do telephony with each
other, with no service provider in the middle.

It’s interesting that the same telcos that now rail against regulation
were happy to try to use it back in 1995 when it suit their purposes.

So ATCA failed to control VoIP via FCC regulation.
But they can use
volume charging
to eliminate both VoIP and video they don’t provide themselves.

The duopoly’s claims of a few people using too much traffic
are a smokescreen.
The real issue is control:
they want to control what passes through “their” networks
so they can profit by as much of it as possible.
I have no objection to telcos and cablecos making a profit.
I do object to them squelching everybody else to do so.
On the Internet you can connect any two tin cans,
unless the duopoly can cut your string.

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

The article names Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T as the three prospective
byte chargers.

I can remember when all the European PTTs charged by the byte.
That held the Internet in Europe back by at least four years.
The article rightly points out byte charging would interfere
with all sorts of business plans.
It would also inhibit political speech.

Isn’t it lovely when the duopoly that controls U.S. Internet access
considers participation a leak that needs to be fixed?